On December 22, 1988, Ken Dornstein got up in his father’s New England house and, bleary-eyed, barely took in the newspaper headline as he made breakfast: PLANE WITH 259 ABOARD CRASHES, DESTROYS 40 HOMES IN SCOTLAND.

It was still some hours before 19-year-old Ken learned that his elder brother, David, had been on board Pan Am Flight 103, the plane that had fallen out of the sky over the town of Lockerbie - and that his own life had changed irrevocably with the snuffing out of David’s by a terrorist bomb.

Ken’s book about his brother’s life and death, while no way an easy read, is certainly life-enhancing.

David Dornstein was just 25 when he boarded the fatal flight at Heathrow and, says his brother, although that random act of taking the wrong plane at the wrong time - he hadn’t been expected home for another week - ended his life prematurely, there’s a sense that he had already packed more into his quarter century than many who live out their full span.

"He spent his last few months in a fabulously full relationship with a woman called Rina," says Ken. "She told me that she and David taught one another to love a little better, and that when it was time to go, they had the grace not to hurt one another."

Ken had a lot of illusions about his brother, many of which were shattered during the decade he spent investigating not only his death, but every step of his short life. Ken became David’s biographer, "Nailing down the chronology of his life, making connections he might not have made himself, tracking down every reference, every acquaintance..."

To view it, follow the link above to the author's own website, and click on video introduction to the right of the page.

Some discoveries were disturbing: not least, finding that David had been sexually abused by a family friend. Some were heartening, others amusing - David’s attempts to write a fan letter to novelist Norman Mailer, at once witty and adulatory, raises a titter. But the overwhelming impression is of Ken’s touching devotion to David, and the realisation that, however flawed, David lived his life to the full.

Judging by the yardstick of David’s own huge ambitions for himself, that life was not a success. Convinced that he was a great writer, he rarely managed to finish a piece of work - not even a short story. Popular with his peers, he nevertheless alienated those whose goodwill he needed, and threw in one ‘good’ job after another - at one low point becoming a skid row bum. (Ken, honest to a fault, does not spare us the aroma of David’s unwashed body.)

Handsome and attractive to women, he never achieved a successful relationship until the last months of his life.

When the initial shock of his brother’s death had been absorbed, Ken began to piece together the fragments of David’s life with the sort of forensic care with which the crash investigators re-assembled the broken shards of Flight 103.

He travels to Lockerbie and flinches neither from the terrible details of how David died when the bomb ripped the airliner apart, nor from the discovery of his brother’s abuse - he even spends a day with the abuser - and his brush with the mental illness that affected their mother.

Whatever else it is, Ken Dornstein’s book is one of the most searingly honest books about family life ever to have been written. But perhaps the most shocking section of all is the one in which Ken confronts not death and suffering - but love, life and happiness in the form of two of David’s ex-girlfriends - Rina, the Israeli woman with whom he spent his last ecstatic months; and Kathryn, an old sweetheart of David’s, who gradually turns into a new sweetheart - and eventually wife - of Ken’s, after he meets her by chance on a train.

"A feeling of doom came later," he writes. "Whenever a big question loomed about our future, I kept running into her past with David." In the end, the pair resolved their problems and they now have two children.

Ken’s initial impulse - to publish the literary ‘masterpiece’ he believed his brother had left behind, turns into a literary achievement of his own. But even as he ends the book ‘happily’ - fathering his son and staring across the courtroom ‘without hatred’ as the Libyan agent convicted of planting the bomb on Flight 103 is jailed - you feel that the pain from the loss of his brother will never fully heal.

"For all that I came to know and understand about David, it didn’t give me back a person I could call any time, day or night, for anything. Always."